Large generally cylindrical rolls of hay or similar crop material are familiar late summer sights in farm fields. Such bales are typically formed by a tractor drawn harvesting machine including near its leading edge a pick-up device in the form of a rotor having a plurality of outwardly extending tines. Rotor rotation serves to pick the crop upwardly over the rotor and rearwardly (opposite the longitudinal direction of harvester travel) for further processing. A comb-like array of fixed elements strip the crop from the tines at an appropriate location to prevent the crop from being returned to the ground. A pick-up or take-up device with a wide swath is desirable to minimize the number of harvester passes necessary to clear a field, however, directly feeding the crop from such a wide swath to a baling chamber would result in an inordinately long and difficult to handle cylindrical roll. Some type of converging arrangement for narrowing the width of the crop entering the baling chamber is typically employed to avoid this problem.
Known large round balers and rectangular balers receive the crop to be baled from a take-up device of great width that delivers it to a transverse conveyor, such as a screw conveyor, that conducts it in turn selectively into a cutter head from which it reaches a baling chamber. In these balers, condensed and compressed crop to be baled can bring about jams in the cutter head. An example of such a baler is disclosed in DE 198 06 630.
An undershot precutter rotor (crop passing beneath the rotor) feeding an overshot floor rotor has become an industry standard. The floor rotor with raised bars welded to the tube provides a passive counter-rotation to the bale to aid in the bale starting to roll its core. Since the floor roller is not a positive feeder of crop, poor bale starting remains a problem. Significant crop loss often occurs behind the floor roller in front of the belts of the lower gate roller.
In U.S. Pat. No. 6,910,325 B2 there is disclosed a large round baler equipped with a plurality of components for delivering crop to an inlet of a baling chamber of the large round baler. These components have a width which is substantially wider than the baling chamber inlet and include a crop take-up device and a crop processing arrangement, such as a cutter head, that receives crop from the crop take-up device. The crop processing arrangement delivers the processed crop to a transverse conveyor, which narrows the stream of crop to the width of the baling chamber inlet.